RFID Helps Department of Defense with Its Relief Efforts in Haiti

Soon after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, on Jan. 12, U.S. military forces arrived on the devastated island to provide aid. Due to the scale of the destruction and infrastructure loss, the only way to address the disaster was though a massive, months-long response. As part of its ongoing efforts to provide supplies to Haiti, the U.S. Department of Defense is employing radio frequency identification to track shipping containers as they travel to and from the island. The tags are commissioned, read and tracked using the DOD's In-Transit Visibility network, which the DOD utilizes for tracking materiel shipments all over the world, and which it last used in Haiti to track shipments in support of Operation Restore Democracy, from late 1994 to mid-1995.